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This tutorial covers the technique of dealing with high contrast

Contrast has always been a problem for photographers whether we work in digital or with film. We long for those sunny days or our holidays abroad, but that same glorious sunshine can spoil our images. We can either expose for the shadow areas and the high lights burn out, or we expose for the highlights and the shadows then go dark and heavy. The old pre-digital solution was to try and place the exposure midways between the shadows and the highlight, but then that was a compromise and not the ideal.

Within Photoshop CS we now have a very quick and easy way to bring back images that at first glance look hopelessly dark due to heavy shadows. Take a look at the image below that is typical of the problems we experience in bright sunshine. The shadows are just too dark to make the image interesting. The result is that the image lacks impact and does not keep our attention for more than a few seconds.

The result below takes seconds and does not require selections, layers or layer masks